By Paul Hemsley

Australian based provider of information management technologies, Nuix has released Proof Finder, a ‘limited edition’ small case investigation solution for managers to investigate employees suspected of misconduct.

Nuix will sell up to 1000 annual licences at $100 each until February 8, 2012 to give managers a less expensive alternative to the enterprise grade edition.

Nuix CEO, Eddie Sheehy said the software is pointed at the data belonging to the employee and indexes that information.

Mr Sheehy said some of Nuix’s Canberra-based clients are the Australian Federal Police, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, the Australian Taxation Office, the Department of Defence, the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry.

He said a number of state governments and police use the software.

According to Mr Sheehy, Proof Finder is the “right product” for local government because “they have nobody; they’re not enabled to have anybody”.

“We do have one or two bigger councils more in Queensland and overseas, so this actually fits their environment to often do small investigations, typically because it’s politically driven and this would work very well for that,” Mr Sheehy said.

Mr Sheehy said for some government entities, the software identifies all the credit card numbers, social security numbers and personal information, which is “incredibly sensitive” and gets governments and companies in trouble regularly because they are not managing that data.

“We find it all and once you’ve found it, you can do something with it,” he said.

He said some “inexperienced organisations” might instead get a copy of an employee’s PST file and load it into their Outlook, which changes all the metadata so that any evidence they were going to use in a legal dispute would have been changed.

“The evidence they’ve just seen is useless, so for $100 they can download Nuix, point it at the data, it’s completely forensically sound,” Mr Sheehy said.

Nuix Marketing Director, Carolyn Betts said IT departments need not use a product like Proof Finder, rather it would be the HR manager or the legal department.

“Government or private organisations are often scared or overwhelmed by the amount of data and find it very difficult, arduous, slow and inaccurate to try and investigate something,” Ms Betts said.

She said companies are often paralysed because of the size of the data and the complexity of trying to investigate it.

“A tool like this is a way for managers who need to investigate information to actually get their hands dirty, educate themselves and explore ways technology can actually enable them to get a better handle on data,” she said.